Where Did You Go? (4 side story in the Unbearable Series)
by Catharsiss-BridgetteHayden
Summary: After the war, Harry isn't willing to let go of Snape. Maybe he doesn't have to.


Harry thought about it.

When all you have of someone that you deeply misunderstood and lost, are their last memories, you play them over and over again. You look for clues through the dark reality, that you never saw before. You try to figure out what was really going on, all the times you thought you knew. You don't get over that blow. You don't get over having the man who sacrificed his entire life for you, and others, a man you hated, die in your arms.

After wishing Snape dead for so many years, after feeling like a tiny, helpless bug in his cold shadow, just trying to scuttle out of his notice and avoid his boot, Harry found himself flattened instead, by a tongue and tone so slicing, that it split him from years away, from childhood to his life as a full grown man. "You're a coward. Just like your father."

He told himself, you had every right to hate Snape. But his massive presence, which darkened your light, was not a massive person. Your child's mind only thought he was. Turns out, he was rather weak in your arms. You felt his shoulder blades through his robe and cloak, and his eyes were filmed in tears. He begged you to take the only thing he had left to give. His memories.

What do you do when that's all he gave you? When that explained everything and confirmed that you wasted an entire life hating the wrong person? You play the memories over and over again. Your mind adapts to them and each time you relive one, your asking, your begging to know more, to fix it, to bring him back and tell him that you're sorry, starts to cause the memories to change. They were already fragmented, like someone who didn't know how to tell a story properly through. Or a bad edit job. Those memories were honest, but selected from others that were hidden from you.

As you replay them, it isn't long before you're seeing, not just what he wanted you to see, but something that he did not intend for you to see. You realize, having woken from the same dream that started from the same pensieve memory, that that slender young man with the long black hair, being taunted by your father, was Snape at an age that's younger than you are now.

You can look at Snape in the memory, where he can't look back at you. You study him. You try to understand why your father couldn't leave him alone. Maybe you stare at his isolation a little too long. You start to see that his mouth holds the same shape that it held twenty, even thirty years later, when it finally relaxed in death. Everything else about him looked different, but his lips allow you to recognize him as a smooth, untested boy of seventeen who would one day become the teacher you feared and hated the most. In that connection, they speak his innocence. They are like a touchstone. His lips were the only things animated and struggling to function, besides his hands, as poison stilled his organs. Only then did his lips part into the most earnest desire to tell you something that would never be revealed to you.

Why did Snape wait until he was dying to show such eagerness to talk to you? To reach out in your direction and to touch you? Why did it take death to show how human and vulnerable the most imposing man you ever knew, was?

Out of all the people you lost, Snape's death was the one you returned to. Snape's memories have given you access to more than the truth. They've given you access to some signal, some magic that belonged entirely to him. You've learned to follow that signal, and that harassed seventeen year-old boy, with the wide, beautiful mouth, but whose hair was such an attention grabber, that it kept most everyone from seeing clearly into his face. There, his eyes kept secrets, as deep-seeing as they were dark, and his mouth stayed defensive and white, camouflaged by equally blanched cheeks and chin, so that no one, not even you, spied how lovely their shape was until it was decades later and they were infused and red, and full of draining life that finally wanted to communicate with you. Finally.

His death was the only one that revealed a hidden beauty. A secret door. With everyone else, you knew what you were losing. With Snape, you didn't know what you had until he took it away.

That's why you play his death over and over again in your mind. You're not haunted by the trauma anymore, like Draco thinks. Not in the same way. You're trying to follow that extraordinary boy who lived inside this man. You're trying not to let the opportunity be gone forever. You're trying to follow that mouth into death, and to kiss it. If it knew what you knew about kissing, now that Draco has taught you, and you're pretty sure that kid your father bullied didn't know, it would want to live. It would create a reason to hang on and to walk out of that boathouse with you, if it could do it all over again.

You don't know when you started to wonder about Snape's personal life, and whom he might've allowed to come into contact with those lips, but you know that he deserved joy and kissing, and normal things. And you could really see yourself being the one to do it. As you replay his fading light, you feel love and respect for a master teacher, but you reach for the man. You try to hold him, to imagine him scolding you for such impropriety, because he's sweetly Victorian like that. You feel you know that about him. It's one of the secrets the memories share with you. No matter how much older he is than you, his values will cause him to look with naivete upon your generation, and find your affection scandalous. You love it. It makes you smile, to think you could've shared that with him, instead of what you did share. You'd break all the rules if you could do it over again. He's worth it, and you want him to know it. But he doesn't play along. He just turns his head and slips out of your reach.

Everyone knows he's dead. He's gone. But all you have to do is close your eyes and there he is walking over the school grounds in his seventeen year-old body. He looks back at you. He knows you're there, and you both know that he can't lift a finger to help you. The memories were enough. It's up to you to unravel them. You saw a body, but you didn't attend the funeral. You didn't investigate beyond that. You were too exhausted with grief. He's a Potions Master. He saved Draco from certain death and bragged that he could the first day you attended his class. Surely, if anyone could fake their own death… If anyone had a reason to do so, it would be him.

As you follow him, you keep your eyes on the spectacular black of his school robe, sun reflecting off of it, and his blazing raven hair. He turns one last time before cutting across the courtyard, and you can just make out his words over his shoulder.

"Find me."

When you wake up, Draco is sleeping beside you. You can hear your daughter stir in her crib, and you know you're going to have to leave them. You're going to have to tell Draco what you think. Snape is alive somewhere, and his memories want you to find him.

End.

Please review!

This video is perfect for this one-shot: watch?v=J3sYlbFXjog&list=PLfP3By3wYC51azxPUJj71cS4eaHJOIsvS&index=77

A/N: This is supposed to stand-alone, but of course it blends in with the next story in the Unbearable series. A little about those. All the stories are connected by the same energy that has different ways of moving, depending on where it's at in the writing process. That's why the stories vary from literary slowness to seemingly insensitive recklessness, to extremely explicit. Draco's story represents the harshest and strongest energy that had to be written with fast moving momentum. It's too strong for some. When I got that out of my system, I was able to step it down and take slower pleasure in fulfilling Snape's story, which is still pretty strong, but not as blunt-force as Draco's. I think. Now, with Harry's story, the energy has slowed down enough to tie all the pieces together. As I was writing it, and missing the satisfaction of posting every week, this one-shot came to me. Harry's story is about love, not fighting, not struggling, not revenge, not even romantic love. Just love. If things change and it gets harsh, I didn't plan it that way. Significant drama might appear, but the intent is to stay on a feel-good path. I don't plan everything out, just some things, because it's more exciting to let the characters go where they want to go and play how they want to play. That way, the story never gets stale or too predictable. :-)

 **Unbearable - Draco:** Super fast, unapologetic energy that wanted out.  
 **Masterpiece - Severus:** A slowing down to think and honor Severus. Still intense.  
 **Harry (Unbearable):** Love. The struggle is over. There is only love, but after what his father did, Harry must convince Snape to see it.


End file.
